This invention relates to applicator dies and more particularly to an applicator die for use with a press to form a crimping machine for crimpingly securing terminals to the ends of leads.
Modern industry requires vast quantities of electrical leads with terminals crimpingly secured to the ends of the lead and many forms of applicator dies have been devised to perform the required crimping operation. Typically, the terminals to be crimped to the ends of the lead are provided in the form of a terminal strip comprising a plurality of serially arranged, interconnected terminals. The leads are fed individually to the die, and the die functions to crimpingly apply a terminal to the end of each lead and sever the terminal from the terminal strip in a manner to produce a continuous series of leads each having a terminal crimpingly secured to the end of the lead.
The leads may be delivered to the die manually by an operator positioned at the die and feeding the leads individually to the die for each successive crimping operation; the leads may be delivered in a fully automated process whereby each lead is fed automatically to the die in timed relationship to a terminal strip arriving at the die; or the leads may be fed to the die by some manner of semiautomatic mechanism. Whereas fully automatic feed of the leads to the die is generally preferable, the mechanisms required to provide such a fully automatic feed are extremely complioated and expensive and it is often not economically feasible to design and provide a fully automatic feed mechanism for each particular job operation to be performed by the applicator die. Specifically, relatively low volume runs for the applicator die do not justify the design and provision of a fully automatic mechanism and yet it is desirable to automate the delivery of the leads to the die to some extent to minimize operator error and operator tedium.